Eldrick: Baby Name of the Day

Tiger Woods elementary school picture
When he was Eldrick (Photo by Splash News)

Did you hear? Eldrick Tont Woods cheated on his wife!

No, trust me, you heard. Really you did. Who the heck is Eldrick Tont Woods? Eldrick was Tiger Woods' given name.

Woods got the nickname “Tiger” from a Vietnamese soldier friend of his father, Vuong Dang Phong, to whom his father had also given the nickname Tiger, according to the blog Lost Golfer.

Woods went by the name Tiger by the time he had achieved national prominence in junior and amateur golf. Woods legally changed his name from Eldrick to Tiger on his 21st birthday.


Gotta admit, that was a really good move. Eldrick is a nice name. It would be perfect if he was one of Stephenie Meyer's Cullens, but not a 21st Century sports icon. Eldrick does not say "fierce, take-no-prisoners golfer" to me. Eldrick says straight and narrow, honest, family man ... oh, wait, maybe it was a really bad move after all.

There are not many other animal names I can think of that would work on a human. The only one that comes to mind is Fox. Friends of ours used this as their pretend name for their unborn child, before they even knew the sex. They laughed about how funny it was. But when the boy was born, they had become so used to calling him Fox, they couldn't imagine calling him anything else, and that became his given name.

I call my daughter My Little Monkey, but that's not really the same.

Another possibility is Bunny, but if my parents had named me that, I would have changed it to Eldrick.

I can't think of any other animal names for babies, can you?

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